Generally speaking, the devices for protection against electrostatic discharges comprise a large number of diodes in series, for example, on the order of twenty for an electronic system to be protected operating at 15 volts.
In order to reduce the number of components, the U.S. Patent Application Pub. No. 2008/0088993 A1 provides a gated thyristor designed notably for the protection against electrostatic discharges. However, in certain cases, such a gated thyristor exhibits a significant instability and requires several triggering circuits in order to trigger the thyristor in the presence of an ESD pulse. The number of components for providing an ESD protection is reduced because such a thyristor needs two triggering circuits which, for a reversible protection, leads to six components (two thyristors and four triggering circuits). However, the need for the presence of such a triggering system still leads to constraints on the surface occupation of such a protection circuit and may, in certain cases, turn out to be complex to implement.